John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Miller’s family was not fooled by his boyish manner. They knew him earnest and just and restless — a first-class mechanic, typist, square-dancer, home-workshop carpenter, radio repairman, you name it. Without talking about it, he lived by rule — a tight rule he’d perhaps never troubled to think out but would never, come hell or high water, slip from. He drank with the others at the VFW Hall, but no man could say he had ever seen Miller drunk, not even high. He drove his car fast, eyes glinting over the high cheekbones, nose like an axe; but he drove with the precision of a professional racer. It seemed, in fact, that he never even laughed except by choice. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the lingering images of a thousand bad moments he had calmly come through: an eight-year-old boy on Chandler Place who’d been hanged by his playmates, a farmer’s wife, out on Ellicott Street Road, stabbed twice with a pitchfork, and other scenes no less terrible, though not as striking: head-on collisions, fires and the Tonawanda’s floods, children run over and crippled or killed, violence, drunkenness, sickness. Once, before the time of the Creek Road overpass, a man who had two children in his car had tried to outrun Miller’s siren by crashing through the crossing gates. The train hit them broadside, and the car exploded like a bomb. Miller could tell about the things he’d seen with a kind of detachment, almost light-heartedness, that would have made you think, if you did not know him, that his emotions ran no deeper than rainwater washing down a street. But it wasn’t so. He was as shocked by such things as Clumly was himself. Maybe more so. The images ate at his generous heart and at times tinged his mock-belligerent cheerfulness with alum. Once in a while, after one of his jokes, he would forget to throw in the open, boyish smile. At such times he seemed much older than he was. Since the beginning, he’d had it in the back of his mind that one of these days he’d get out of police work; but the images he carried with him had made him put it off, year by year — so Clumly guessed — until one day it had come clear to him that, for better or worse, he was going to die a cop.

In Miller there was not an ounce of what young Hodge, in his article, had called “schizophrenia.” He acted in his own right, as surely as Kozlowski did, and unlike Kozlowski he acted out of more than a native feeling for right: he believed law important and valuable, not simply in theory — Miller was no theorist — but in his blood and bones. In his blood and bones he believed in boxing and wrestling but hated a street brawl, which had no rules. His whole body tensed with joy to the clatter and slam of a stock-car race, but with speeders he was a tormenter out of hell. He used his uniform as he used his voice, as an unself-conscious assertion of lawful authority. His virtue and defect was that he thought he knew better than other men, in the same way that he knew better than his wife and sons; and, generally speaking, the truth was that he did. He accepted the responsibility laid on him like a mantle by both nature and society, if Hodge’s article was right, and, overworked, forever lonely — for all the good humor in his disposition — he preserved his good health by the voluntary self-abandonment of watching television or dancing at the VFW Hall or building mahogany knickknack shelves — he had literally hundreds of them — in his basement. And Clumly knew one thing more. Miller was superstitious. Where he got it, who could say? — some spark of true religion, maybe, in a generally indifferent Catholic childhood; or perhaps it was simply a snatch at absolute control by a soul uncommonly conscientious but imperfectly informed on the ins and outs of time and space, struggling through a labyrinthine universe full of surprises. He had the kind of superstition which runs not to avoiding black cats, walking around ladders, or carrying talismans, but to nervous presentiment and an obscure sense of the stirrings of omens and portents. He distrusted this tendency he had: he jokingly denied it and mocked what he saw of it in others. He was the first to scoff at talk of flying saucers, or prowling ghosts, or healing by faith: nevertheless, he read whatever happened into his hands on such subjects, and he frequently glanced at his horoscope in the Daily News, scoffed to the others at what he read, and, if any of it seemed to come true, took what he no doubt imagined was merely casual note of the fact. He’d been the first to mock Clumly’s indefinite hunch about the Sunlight Man and had found good reason for laughing it off as an old man’s nervousness. Nevertheless, he too had waited uneasily, had commented over and over that the weather was wrong for the time of year (in some way he could not pinpoint), and, when finally the old man’s hunch had proved right, Miller had felt, you would have sworn, a peculiar relief. The feeling had not lasted. He was troubled now by dreams which he could not remember afterward and which, in retrospect, did not seem to have been dreams at all, but something else. So he’d told Figlow, Clumly listening at the keyhole. “Beats all, the way the boss knew all along,” he said, grinning thoughtfully. “Shit,” Figlow said. “Pure guessing.”

Figlow, too, believed he knew better than other men, including Clumly. Their stupidity sometimes astounded him and at other times merely filled him with mild disgust. When a man came in to pay eighty dollars’ worth of parking tickets — such things happened sometimes — he was incredulous. “It’s crazy,” he would say, shaking his head. He had a wife he could barely stand the sight of: she ran up bills and actually seemed not to understand that with a charge account you still, sooner or later, had to pay. She worked as a waitress at The Red Ozier, and he suspected, without any real evidence, that she had lovers. He suspected his daughter, too. She was fifteen. By accident he had found out she was taking the pill.

Yet Figlow, too, had good in him as well as evil. He wanted no trouble in the world and generally made none himself if he could help it. He was a stubby little man with bushy eyebrows and coal-black hair and very little chin. The men called him “Shorty,” and though he hated the name he accepted it with no overt complaint, exactly as he accepted, day after day, the salami sandwich in his lunchpail, neither fighting the thing nor submitting to it. He wanted peace not because, given peace, there were things he would like to do. He took it for its own sake, on the grounds (Clumly guessed) that the easiest way of life is the best. He was not brave, especially, yet not cowardly either: his awareness that the gun was there on his hip made up for the shortness of stature which, before he’d joined the Police Force, had inclined him to leave trouble alone whenever possible. He’d had plenty of that swallowing of pride, in his former life. He had a slight heart murmur, which had kept him out of the Korean War, and so he’d worked as a cook in a tavern-diner. He’d suffered the usual brainless complaints of diner patrons, no two of whom meant the same thing by “rare” or “medium” when they ordered a T-bone steak, and along with that the eternal nagging of the owner’s wife, a short-tempered middle-aged Irish lady who blamed her flare-ups, afterward, on the fact that she was a redhead, which she was not. But even with the gun adding inches to his stature, he was not out-and-out vicious, merely impatient. What made an offender behave as he did was a matter of indifference to Figlow. Breaking laws was moronic, whatever the motive; and, what was more, law-breaking meant more dull, petty work on Figlow’s desk. He accepted the work without comment, nevertheless, just as he accepted his daughter’s whoring around, if it was that. In the back of his mind, only Clumly knew, he carried, like a secret treasure in a small boy’s trouser pocket, the idea of someday throwing the whole thing over and going to Mexico, alone.